I have plenty to say about dialogue—which I’m happy to share—but really I think it comes down to this:
Listening.
I can write in a believable teen voice because I was surrounded by teens as a teacher, and also by my kids and their friends. I’ve been submerged in the teen voice for decades, and for decades, I’ve listened.
I’ve also taken notes. I’m not a big note-taker, but sometimes a real person will say something in a unique way that can spark a departure from my own known speech patterns and lead me to a new, fresh voice. I used to tell myself that I’d remember the syntax or turn of phrase, only to have it escape me half an hour later. So I’ve learned the hard way—it’s better to jot it down.
I do not keep a three-by-five card in my back pocket. I’ve tried that and I’ve failed.
I’m also terrible at taking notes on my phone.
And a notebook?
Where did I put that again?
So unfortunately, I don’t have a magic system to share, but I will say this: Just get it down. In whatever way works for you, jot it down.
You may be the organized sort and transfer it directly to a folder when you get home.
I would admire you greatly for that.
And, yeah, hate you a little too.
But if you’re more like me, you may scribble it down and forget about it. Or lose it. Because maybe the kids are crying or school is stressing you out or you’ve trapped a burglar in your basement and he’s screaming stuff at you that’s more pressing than that clever turn of phrase you jotted down on a napkin at the coffee shop (not to mention that said burglar is spewing stuff your writer’s brain is dying to also jot down if it weren’t for the pesky need to dial 911).
So your little coffee shop note gets pushed aside and out of mind. But then, a week, a month, six months later, you rediscover that note in a jacket pocket. And in the interim a character has developed in your mind or on the pages of your project, and you realize that the phrase or syntax has been lurking in your subconscious, and that you’re ready to use it…or maybe you already have.
The act of writing things down helps us remember, even if we think we’ve forgotten.
The point is to tune in and pay attention to the language of others. It doesn’t take much of a twist to give a character a unique sound, something that can be done quite simply by giving them a signature phrase or expression—one you may have heard in that coffee shop one morning.
For example, in Flipped, Bryce uses “…and that, my friend, was…” That’s his phrase. His friends don’t use it, Juli certainly doesn’t, nor do his parents or teachers or anybody else in the book. That is his, and it helps separate his voice from Juli’s as we alternate between their points of view.
Part of “listening” transfers to listening to your characters. So if one of them pops off with “Dude!” (or some such), do not muddy the voices by having other characters use that expression. Sure, in real life, no one teen in a group is going to have an exclusive on that (or any other) expression, but if you’re looking to help define your characters through dialogue, it’s very helpful to have expressions or phrases that are specific to them.
Sammy Keyes uses “holy smokes.”
Nobody else in Sammy World does.
Sammy’s friend Dot uses funny expressions based on her Dutch heritage. Only Dot would say something like “Whirling windmills!” when expressing her surprise.
And Sammy’s friend Holly uses “crud.”
Nobody else in Runaway or Sammy World ever does.
The benefit of this is when you’re constructing dialogue and you want it to move quickly, without the drag of attribution (specifying who’s saying what), you could do this:
“Holy smokes!”
“Whirling windmills!”
“Oh, crud.”
There are no attributions, but there is no doubt about who’s speaking.
The danger with signature phrases is the tendency to overuse them. It’s best to think of them as a spice. Something to sprinkle into your dialogue. If you oversalt (or -pepper or -paprika), you will ruin the dish. So how much is too much? This is best assessed in the revision process, rather than trying to gauge it in real (writing) time. Maybe you weren’t aware that you’d used a particular phrase four times in five pages because it took you all day to write those five pages. But when it takes seven minutes to read those five pages, you’ll realize that you’ve oversalted. Fortunately, the dish isn’t ruined, because you can easily excise. When in doubt, cut it out.
Another way I’ve learned to avoid the drag of attributions (which also helps curb the use of -ly adverbs) is to marry a character’s actions to their words. For example:
Dot was panting when she reached us. “He’s…not…there!”
I yanked her behind the fence. “Then where?”
Holly pointed at a man hurrying toward us from across the street. “Uh…we might want to get out of here?”
That’s a little overdone, but it gives you the idea of how coupling action and attitude with dialogue can convey a lot, and quickly.
There’s also the technique of giving a character a “signature item.” For example, Sammy wears high-tops. Torn-up, secondhand high-tops. And Dot’s drink of choice is (ugh) root beer.
So instead of writing something like “I’m not doing that,” Dot said angrily, you can convey motion, attitude, and personality by replacing it with Dot slammed down her root beer. “I’m not doing that.”
In all of the above examples, you can add and said before the quote, or tack on a she said after it, but why? We’re going for action and forward motion. Adding the attribution is unnecessary and counterproductive.
Likewise, when Sammy finds herself in trouble with authority—at home, at school, or at the police station—we might find her toeing the ground with her high-top or stepping with one toe on the peeling rubber of the other. This creates the feeling of remorse or nervousness without her having to say that’s how she’s feeling. “It wasn’t me,” I told him nervously gets the boost of both motion and emotion (plus added detail about the location) when we script it as I toed at a crack in the linoleum. “I swear it wasn’t me.”
As with any writing device, don’t overdo it or move beyond transparent. If your character adjusts their hat or twirls their hair or blows their nose too often, they will become a caricature of themselves—something you definitely don’t want. He said and she said are often the cleanest and most transparent way to create dialogue. If it fits your style to sometimes substitute said with verbs like cackled or panted or cajoled, go for it—sparingly. Just avoid at all costs redundant or overdone attributions like cackled derisively or panted breathlessly or cajoled pleadingly. If the verb doesn’t cut it on its own, find a better verb.
So, in crafting believable dialogue, listen both to the people around you and to your characters. Speak a character’s words aloud and ask yourself: Does it sound real? If it doesn’t ring true, start whittling. People usually don’t talk in long, convoluted sentences. For snappy dialogue, avoid getting too clever or long-winded. Your character may simply be trying to say “Dude, no.” If that’s the case, don’t say more. Say that.
And try finding something unique about your characters—a mannerism, an expression, a clothing style…anything. Then challenge yourself to write some dialogue with limited attributions and no -ly adverbs. See if it helps the back-and-forth between characters come to life. Now, too much back-and-forth between characters without attributions can become confusing to the reader, so don’t go crazy—to achieve a good flow, you’ll need to keep fine-tuning the exchange until it reads smoothly.
It takes a little effort, but as your dialogue starts to really come alive, you’ll see that it’s worth it.
It is imperative that you keep in mind who your audience is. If you’re writing for adults, tr
y a highbrow literary style if you like—many truly enjoy it.
But if you’re writing for kids, too much complex or convoluted language can be off-putting or, worse, sound phony. It can also really detract from forward movement in a story as the reader wades through description on their quest for action.
Around our house we use an expression to describe a rock song that has a lot of speedy guitar work. We say it has too much weedle-lee-woo. If a guitar player is shredding away—notes flying, with hammer-ons and pull-offs galore—but it doesn’t take the song anywhere, that’s too much weedle-lee-woo. Sure, the player has great chops, but the way they’re being applied is not actually contributing to the musicality of the song. He or she is just showing off, and it doesn’t take long for the listener to become bored (or make cracks about weedle-lee-woo).
But a tasty guitar lick slipped in between phrases can add a lot to a song. It can totally make a song.
The same thing applies to the writing of books. Too much weedle-lee-woo and the reader begins to fast-forward or tune out. Especially for kids, long, detailed description without action is the kiss of death. If you’re going to write lengthy paragraphs about the beauty of the ocean as it cascades onto the waiting shore and glistens in the shimmering moonlight, you’d better throw in some sharks quick or your book and all its beautiful words are going to get sidelined.
In a nutshell: Don’t try to impress your reader with your writing chops. Throw in a few tasty literary licks and get back to the story.
Of course, it’s possible to go too far the other way. A book that is all plot without the grace of beautiful language or the beating heart of compelling characters is like a movie that is nonstop action. Things may be exploding and crashing and shooting and crumbling all over the place, and the intention is likely to keep viewers on the edge of their seats, but the result is that our senses get numbed and we stop caring. Aliens invade, civilizations crumble, scores of people die…yet we don’t feel anything.
If the plot is all action, viewers—and readers—have no time to process anything more than forward movement. There’s no opportunity to get inside the heart of the characters. We need time to come down a little so the next shock actually affects us.
It’s a balance. And your job as a writer is to create the right balance for the story you want to tell and the audience you want to reach. That might mean going heavier on the literary licks, or it might mean intensifying the plot.
So definitely work on your chops, but also spend time analyzing when they add, when they detract, and when they, you know, weedle-lee-woo.
Writers write. They don’t just dream about doing it or rationalize why they aren’t able to at the moment; they face the blank page and they write.
So how do you make that happen? How do you transition from thinking about it or dabbling in it to really doing it?
Setting the alarm for five in the morning doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually get up then. It’s much easier to turn off the alarm and go back to sleep.
I am a big fan of sleep.
And telling yourself Today could be the day will not get you out of bed either, because whatever project you’re working on has more to do with the future than the present.
And right now, sleep is so…nice.
When people began asking me how I managed to drag myself out of bed day after day for something that didn’t seem to be working out for me, I started questioning it myself.
Part of the answer may lie in my upbringing. My parents immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands (often referred to as Holland). Known for its tulips and windmills, it’s also home to one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World—the Zuiderzee Works, which is a man-made system of dams and dikes used to reclaim land from the sea. After centuries of repeated flooding and devastation that wiped out whole villages, the Dutch engineered a way to hold back the sea and convert a thousand square miles of submerged territory into useful land.
So somewhere in the mind-set of Dutch people is the notion that you can go up against huge forces of nature. That you can push back the sea. That you can rise up from disaster, rebuild, and flourish.
That requires a strong work ethic, which my parents definitely had and firmly impressed upon us kids. We had a checklist of chores, and we did them. And when we were done, Mom always had something else for us to do.
Our parents believed in living within their means and saving for a rainy day (and it rains a lot in Holland). Their approach to all things was built on the precept that if you could do it yourself, you did it, and if it was something you didn’t know how to do yet, you figured out how.
Also, we didn’t waste. Dinner was finished or it became breakfast. Clothes were handed down. Things were mended, repaired, or repurposed. We rarely went out to eat.
Sandwiched between brothers, I was not given special treatment for being a girl. I did learn the domestic skills that girls were expected to have back then—sewing, cooking, cleaning—but I also did the things my brothers did, like chopping wood, moving wheelbarrows of dirt, laying bricks, hammering nails…that sort of thing.
There was no going out to play until the job was done, and done didn’t just mean the task was complete. It also meant that the work area was swept up and the tools were put away.
I’m certain I’m a “finisher” because of the way my parents raised me. Starting something and not finishing it feels weird to me. Knowing something’s not done sort of bugs me.
When I started my first novel, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Nobody but my husband knew I was writing it and there was no deadline, so as the reality of the work necessary to write a novel sank in, it would have been completely reasonable to put it aside.
But 627 pages later, I finished it.
And even if it was pretty terrible, that doesn’t matter. Sometimes finishing is accomplishment enough. The sheer will it takes to get to that last page gives you the confidence that you can, in fact, do this, and the bonus is that the next time you begin writing, you’ll be a stronger, better, more confident writer.
It’s like running a marathon when you’ve never done it. You set the goal, you do the training, you get to the starting line, and the only thing—the only thing—that matters is getting over the finish line. Sure, you start out with your lofty goals, but in the end your pace doesn’t matter, your splits don’t matter, your overall time doesn’t matter…all that matters is crossing that finish line.
There are always great excuses to quit (and your brain will play tricks on you and conjure up doozies beginning around Mile 18). But getting over the finish line of your first marathon—even if you come in last—will change your life. Everyone I know who’s done it has said the same thing: It gives you the belief, way down inside, that you can do anything.
Writing your first novel is very much like running your first marathon. Finish it and you’ll know you can, which is huge.
So what’s the harm in quitting and trying again with a new idea?
Quitting breeds doubt. It also keeps you from flexing your writing muscles. Writing to completion will strengthen your skills. Beginnings are easy. Endings are awesome. But to get from the beginning to the end, you need to traverse the middle, and yes, there’ll be a Mile 18 in your novel.
The middle is where books can begin to drag. It’s where most writers lose their steam. How are you going to get good at mitigating the sagging middle if every time you reach it, you quit? Becoming a finisher isn’t hard, it’s just habit. And you can set that habit with everyday things. Fold the laundry, put it away. Vacuum your room, put the cleaner away. Do the homework, put it in your backpack.
The trick is to keep the tasks small and manageable so you can say, I finished. If you’re tackling a big job—something like painting a room—divide it into manageable subtasks. Instead of “paint the room,” make it “prep the room,” then “mask the
room,” then “paint the room.” Finishing each step gets the job done, and it doesn’t feel so overwhelming.
Apply the concept of finishing small steps to your writing: Finish the page. Finish the chapter. Repeat until you’ve finished the story.
Step by step.
Page by page.
Don’t let your mind trick you into quitting.
You can do this.
Over a year after I’d been invited via a personally signed but boilerplate postcard to submit How I Survived Being a Girl to an editor, her rejection letter landed in my mailbox.
So much time had passed that a response from her was unexpected, but it was a nice rejection in that it wasn’t the typical badly copied version of an ancient ditto from the sixties that said the usual We’re sorry, this is not right for us at this time. (And yes, some rejections I received did look that overcopied and outdated.)
Instead, it was a full-page typed letter that contained “some comments and suggestions” that she “hoped would be helpful.” She gave some general input on improving structure and character growth, but I could not really see past her comment about the book’s length.
“It needs to be about half as long.”
What?
I tossed her letter aside.
Another rejection. And it had taken her a year to write it! So, pffft.
But my husband had a different reaction. “This is actually a really nice letter,” he said.
I scowled at him. Pffft.
“Maybe you should consider some of what she said?”
“She wants me to cut it in half!”
“Maybe start by looking it over with her letter in mind?”
“I’m not going to cut it in half!”
I remember heated silence. Mostly generated by me. And then…
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